Green Production

Toward Environmental Rationality

by Enrique Leff

168 pages, paperback, Guilford Press, 1995

Green Production , a translation of Leff's work Ecologia y Capital, addresses
the relation of production to development and the environment.

Praise for Green Production

"This work is one of the most coherent and sensitive explorations of the contradictions
inherent in economic and environmental thinking. Enrique Leff has provided an important and
enlightening demonstration of the critical relationship of production to development, ecology
and culture."--Elmar Altavater, Free University of Berlin

"A magisterial synthesis of Marxism, ecology, and cultural theory, Leff's book sweeps away
much of the intellectual and theoretical detritus surrounding sustainability, and proposes
a compelling vision for an alternative ecotechnology rationality."--Michael Watts, University
of California, Berkeley

"A very important book--It reviews the whole of the complex question of the relationship
between Ecology and Economic Rationality and Calculation, starting from a critical reading
of the philosophical debates over nature and society into a review of integrated resource
management proposals, stressing the difficult valuation of environments."--Samir Amin, Director,
Third World Forum, Dakar

"You can disagree with some (or many) of the theses of Enrique Leff's book. What cannot
be denied is that Green Production is one of the most serious contributions to the
contemporary debate on political ecology worldwide."--Victor M. Toledo, National University
of Mexico

Quotes from Green Production

"Neither neo-Malthusian population pressure nor 'natural' tendencies in social evolution
toward increasing energy consumption are sufficient explanations for the global environmental
crisis. The crisis results from an economic system geared toward maximizing short-run private
profits, that induces the over-exploitation and overconsumption of natural resources. In
state socialist economies, the logic of maximizing economic surpluses had similar effects,
undermining the ecological basis for sustainable development.

"Therefore, capitalist and socialist modes of production, under different political systems
and ways of distributing the social surplus, have nonetheless shared a generalized process
of capital accumulation. In capitalist states, free trade ideologies legitimate the need
to constantly increase capital and labor productivity and to expand markets. In socialist
regimes, an evolutionary concept of history privileged the development of productive forces
over the transformation of social relations of production and ecological conditions of sustainability.
In both cases, the protection of natural resources and ecological balance were overridden
by the need to accelerate capital accumulation. From opposing ideological perspectives, the
capitalist and socialist powers maintained in the past a battle toward economic growth as
the primary means of attaining global political supremacy."

. . .

"A strong degree of contradiction, however, exists between the objective of reaching a determinate
rate of growth measured in terms of market prices, and the possibility of including in this
economic calculus certain considerations that promote an environmental potential of development.
The system of economic calculation that is based on principles of optimizing an objective
function reduces the factors to be considered in the development process to quantifiable,
aggregated units of measurement. And for a lack of alternative indicators, this function
is formed through a system of market pricing, whose tendencies can be regulated by certain
'planning prices' that introduce qualitative valorizations for an analysis of alternative
social objectives, but that is incapable of making a specific evaluation of the multiple
levels of articulation of economic, ecological, social, and cultural processes.

In any process of optimization where the temporal dimension is included, neoclassical
economics interprets this as a rate of interest that penalizes the future, for present benefits.
This conception of the future, as 'a cost', that makes any consideration of the long term
superfluous, does not derive from any characteristic of physical time, not even from an ineluctable
social psychology, but from the theoretical rationalization of capital's role in the process
of production.

"The problem of fixing a social discount rate faces further difficulties when attempts are
made to translate cultural values, social objectives, and ecological temporalities to a system
of market prices. The perception of time is a cultural trait that impedes the establishment
of a common norm or a system of equivalencies between a currently perceived value and the
renunciation of this value for future benefits. To this is added the impossibility of discounting
uncertainty in the future because of social conditionality, and the occurrence of unpredictable
natural catastrophes or the emergence of new productive potentials that are not translatable
to market prices in order to be extrapolated toward the future to evaluate possible costs
and benefits. In this sense, the long-term necessities of production and consumption do not
fit into the categories of current capital investment, and it is difficult to internalize
them within a limited economic calculation in order to incorporate the goals of an environmental
perspective of development."

. . .

"The objective of ecodevelopment, defined as a strategy for the production and application
of knowledges and techniques necessary for the sustainable management of particular ecosystems,
is a social process inserted within the struggles of each community for the appropriation
of their natural resources and their social wealth.

"In this way ecodevelopment is linked to a political process of technical and social change,
of reappropriation of nature and knowledge. The obstacles to the production and application
of new technological strategies of ecodevelopment do not emerge solely from their technical
viability and economic feasibility. These obstacles emerge above all from the conflicting
interests between the beneficiaries of the established economic rationality and those social
groups that have been marginalized and that would benefit from an alternative productive
and social rationality. Such changes would affect the interests of those who own and control
the means of production--including land and technological knowledge--and who are able to
take advantage of the wealth produced within the dominant economic order."